His eyes flickered off hopefully at a bus stopped beside us, as if it might contain a plainclothesman or CIA man or FBI man. There were undoubtedly a few of each, but they were out of his reach.
`Does she live alone?' I asked. It was six forty-eight.
`Uh . . . Well, yes.'
`What is she like?'
`She's disgusting!' he spit out emphatically. `Flesh, flesh, flesh - a woman,' he added.
'Ahh,' I said, disappointed. `Do you think there's any chance at all that she might be involved in a plot?'
`I've known her three months. She thinks I'm a professional wrestler. No. No. She's horrible, but she's not - it's not her.'
`Look,' I said impulsively. `Tonight the place for you to be is away from your apartment and out of public places. We'll have dinner in this out-of-the-way restaurant I know of and then we can all stay with this lady of yours.'
`Are you sure...?'
`if anyone is going to try to kill you tonight, you can depend on me.'
Chapter Seventy-nine
When Jake Ecstein was walking through a Dice Center one day he overheard a conversation between two people.
`Show me the best role you have,' said the first person.
`All my roles are the best,' replied the second. `You can't find in me any piece of behavior which isn't the best.'
`That's conceited,' said the first.
`That's diceliving,' replied the second.
At these words Jake Ecstein became enlightened.
from The Book of the Die
Chapter Eighty
It occurred to me on my drive to Harlem with Frank Osterflood after our uneventful dinner at an obscure restaurant in Queens that I might try to `take him for a ride' to some dimly lit nowheres where mobsters drive to put other less successful mobsters away, but I didn't know any dimly lit nowheres, and besides, I was beginning to worry that Osterflood might turn his paranoiac tendencies toward me and attack.
We arrived at the apartment house of Osterflood's `date' at a little after eight thirty-four that evening. We seemed to be somewhere near Lenox Avenue on 143rd Street or 145th Street - I never did find out which. My victim paid the cabby, Who looked resentful at being stuck in the middle of no-man's land when he might be at the Hilton or Park Avenue. No one came close to us when we walked the thirty feet or so from the sidewalk to the door of the elegant and crumbling apartment building, although I sensed dozens of dark faces glaring at us in the deep dusk.
We clumped up the three flights of stairs together like a man and his shadow, I fingering my gun and Osterflood telling me to be careful of my footing. The sound of galloping horses and shouts came out of a first-floor apartment, highpitched hysterical female laughter from the second floor, but from the third, silence. As Osterflood knocked, I reminded him firmly that my name was Lou Smith. I was a fellow professional wrestler. The incongruity of two professional wrestlers showing up to court a lady, one of them dressed with Brooks Brothers immaculateness and the other like a down-and-out hood escaped me at the time.
The woman who came to the door was a middle-aged fat-lady with stringy hair, a double chin and jolly smile. She barely seemed a Negress.
`I'm Lou Smith, professional wrestler,' I said quickly, offering my hand.
`Good for you,' she said and walked out past us and waddled on down the stairs.
`Is Gina here?' Osterflood called after her, but she stomped on down unheeding.
I followed him inside, through a small entranceway and into a fairly large living room, dominated by a huge television set squatting against one wall directly opposite a long, Danish-modern couch. There was wall-to-wall carpeting, thick and soft and a pretty tan color, but badly spotted is front of the television set and the couch. The splash of running water came from a room off to the right, which, from the bulk of white I could make out, seemed to be a kitchen. Osterflood called in that direction `Gina?'
`Yeahhh,' came a high-pitched feminine voice.
While I was squinting at two photo portraits on one wall they looked, so help me, like Sugar Ray Robinson and Al Capone - the woman came to the living room and confronted us. She was a young, full-figured, dark-haired woman, with the face of a child. Big, brown eyes exuded innocence, and her dark complexion was flawlessly smooth.
`What's this?' she said shrilly and coldly in a voice that, while high-pitched like a child's, had a `what's-in-it-for-me?' cynicism that was totally incongruous with the child's face.
'Ah, this is Dr. Luke Rh-'
`SMITH!' I shouted, 'Lou Smith, professional wrestler.'
I advanced and stuck out a hand.
`Gina,' she said coldly; her hand was lifeless in mine.
She moved past us into the living room and said over her shoulder `You guys want a drink?'
We both asked for Scotch and while she was kneeling and then standing before an abundantly supplied liquor cabinet in the corner to the left of the television set, Osterflood and I sat down on opposite ends of the couch, he staring at the gray lifeless screen of the television set and I at the brown leather miniskirt and tan, creamy legs of Gina.
She came and handed each of us a nice stiff Scotch on the rocks, staring into my eyes with that same incongruous innocent child's face and saying coldly: `You want the same as him?'
I looked over at Osterflood, who was staring down at the rug. He seemed sullen.
`What do you mean?'
I asked, looking back up at her. She was wearing a tan, v-neck sweater that buttoned down the front and her breasts ballooned out at me distractingly.
`What are you here for?' she asked, not taking her eyes off me.
`I'm just an old friend,' I said. `Just here to watch.'
'That type,' she said. `Fifty bucks.'
'50 bucks?'
'You heard me.'
'I see. It must be quite a show: I looked back at Osterflood, he still stared at the subliminal floor show on the rug. `I'll need to think about it.'
`I'd like another drink,' Osterflood said and, head lowered, reached out his long, nicely tailored arm with his glass and two ice cubes.
'The money,' she said to him without moving.
He pulled out his wallet and peeled out four bills of undetermined denomination. She ambled over to him, took the bills, fingered each of them carefully, then took his glass and disappeared back into the kitchen. She moved like a sleepy leopardess.
Osterflood said without looking over at me: 'can't you stand guard outside?'
`Can't take the chance. The killer might already be inside the apartment.'
He glanced up and around nervously.
`I thought you said your date was disgusting?' I said.
`She is,' he said, and shuddered.
The disgusting flesh flesh flesh returned and fixed Osterflood his second drink and freshened her own. I was only sipping at mine, determined to keep my mind alert for the clean, aesthetic moment of truth. It was eight forty-eight by my watch.
`Look, mister,' Gina was saying in front of me again. `Fifty bucks or out. This isn't a waiting room.'
Her voice! If only she would never say a word.
`I see.'
I turned to my friend. `Better give her a fifty, Frank.'
He took out his wallet a second time and pulled off a single bill. She fingered it and stuffed it into a tiny pocket in her tiny leather skirt.
`Okay,' she said. `Let's go.'
She walked over and turned on the television set, fiddling carefully with the dials and adjusting the volume quite high. When she moved away from the screen three young men were twitching away and playing loudly some rhythmic tune which was world-famous and which I almost recognized.
I was paying fifty dollars for this? No. Osterflood was paying. I relaxed. - `You want some hash tonight?' she asked Osterflood. He was brooding into his half-finished drink.
`Yes,' he said.
When Gina returned from the kitchen this time she had a small pipe, apparently fully loaded, since she handed it to
Osterflood and he lit up right away.
He passed it up to her and she took a long toke and then sat down on the couch between us, leaning back and reaching out an arm to hand the pipe to me. I'd read someplace that the United States Marines found marijuana and hashish excellent aids to the performance of their duties, so I took a healthy puff and passed the pipe back to her.
After only about three or four puffs by each of us, the pipe seemed to have gone out, but after a few minutes, as I was watching a handsome, sincere American clobber a greasy Latin American type on the TV screen, the pipe appeared under my nose again nicely lit. As I passed the pipe back to Gina, holding the smoke in my lungs, I smiled at her, and her soft baby face and large brown eyes looked sorrowfully and innocently into mine. If only she doesn't talk. Was she Negro or Italian? By the fourth toke of the second series I was really enjoying the rhythm of the deep inhale, the earnest American talking, frowning, driving his jet-powered jeep, then the blossoming beneath my nose of the gemstudded pipe, the inhale ... As I passed the pipe back to her this time, I felt like smiling at her again, hoping she was enjoying the show too, and I watched with interest as she put the pipe in her mouth and Osterflood's hand bloomed into view just below her chin, clutched like an octopus onto one side of the v of Gina's sweater and then in slow motion flew away, sending the buttons in front popping off onto the living room rug like machine-gun pellets. Gins continued her inhale and handed the pipe back to me, her eyes focused on the ceiling. I looked at the pipe pleasurably, examining the lacework of fake gems around the outside of the bowl, looked at the small, black, charcoal-looking lump inside, and took a pleasant, long toke. ABC, I now noticed, was presenting `CIA in Action' a new adventure series, and when the commercial for Johnson's Baby Powder ended, two earnest Americans, one of whom I remembered seeing earlier, began talking about a Red plot in front of a backdrop of toiling peasants.
When I turned lazily to hand Gina the pipe she was sitting exactly as before, her head back against the couch and eyes ceiling-ward, but nude from the waist up. Her two breasts rose on her chest like two mounds of molded honey, with two neat circular sculpted crowns of brown sugar at the peak of each rounded, honeyed hilt.
Without smoking she passed the pipe on to Osterflood on the other side of her. The pipe went flying off onto the living room floor on top of the buttons, the sweater and the bra. He had bashed at her hand.
`Get up,' Osterflood said.
Slowly, like a sated leopardess, she stood. I could see Osterflood now and he was staring at her bleary-eyed and without expression, neat in his soft, gray suit.
`You bitch,' he said dully. `You cunt-caked bitch.'
'I was smiling to myself without thought, leaning back and examining with aesthetic bliss the curve of Gina's right breast, which stuck out gracefully in front of her right arm like the .prow of a boat nosing out from behind a cliff. An earnest American jawed aggressively with a greasy American just-at the tip of the short bowsprit.
`You slut,' Osterflood said just a bit louder. `You juicy-jointed sewer. Shit-slitted slut. Slime-oozing whore.'
Gina was fumbling with the belt and then one side of her feather skirt and after a moment or two; the skirt dropped like a guillotine to the floor at her feet. She was now totally nude. A long lovely scar ran down the back of one thigh.
`You bitch!' Osterflood screamed, 'and he staggered woozily to his feet and wobbled uncertainly for several seconds. There was a scream from the TV screen and I glanced idly over to see one of the Americans pick up one of the peasants and throw him onto a manure pile where another peasant could be seen struggling ineffectually. I turned back just in time to see Osterflood grab Gina's curly dark hair and throw her back onto the couch. She bounced once, in segments, and then sat quietly, her large brown eyes looking vacantly at the ceiling.
`Feces!' shouted Osterflood. `Female feces!' I smiled friendlily over at her.
`It's going to be a nice evening,' I said pleasantly.
Chapter Eighty-one
I have been a woman on hundreds of occasions: in my dice life, group dice therapy and in our Dice Centers. I've usually enjoyed myself thoroughly. The only time I haven't enjoyed being a woman is when people have thought I was a man. For example, my experience with the Cleveland Brown defensive tackle (he used to be a truck driver - of Good Humor Ice Cream trucks) was at first unrewarding because he wanted me to be a man and I thought he was a man. Confusion of roles is always difficult.
I found that being a woman physically was more difficult than being one socially and psychologically. Sexually it was a big disappointment. I simply don't have the right equipment to enjoy being laid. It is much more pleasant in bed to play a passive `feminine' role with an aggressive `masculine' woman than with a real man. The pump of a penis in the anus is, to be precise, a pain in the ass. The feel of a nice hot prick moiling in one's mouth is certainly an experience that everyone should try, but is for me one of the minor sexual pleasures. The flood of hot semen into the mouth is pleasing enough if one takes any pride at all in one's work, but it is at best a psychological pleasure rather than a physical one. Choking on over-salted soup is not my idea of sensuous bliss, but I admit my limitations.
The appeal of being a woman - at least for me - lies in the freshness of the experience and in the passivity, the masochistic passivity I might even say. There is something basic in wanting to be dominated by a superior creature whether man or Die. Responding to men respectfully and passively has never been my majority nature, but the times the Die has ordered me to play a woman have uncovered the latent slave in me.
And certainly being a woman is absolutely basic for every man in our society. And vice versa for women. The human is built to imitate, and every male has stored within him a thousand female gestures, phrases, attitudes and acts which long to be expressed, but are buried in the name of masculinity. It is a tragic loss. Perhaps the single greatest contribution of our Dice Centers is that they create an environment which encourages the expression of all roles; it encourages bisexuality. One might even more honestly say full sexuality, were honesty one of our virtues.
I have been a woman on hundreds of occasions and I recommend that every other healthy, red-blooded American man be one too.
Chapter Eighty-two
Dicemasters train young people as well as old. Two Dicemasters each had a child prodigy. One child, going to buy bubble-gum at the store each morning, would often meet the other going to the same place.
`Where are you going?' the first asked one day.
`I'm going wherever my dice fall,' the other responded.
This reply stopped the first child, who immediately went back to his Dicemaster for help. `Tomorrow morning,' Jake Ecstein told him, `when you meet that smart aleck, ask him the same question. He'll give you the same answer, and then you ask him: "Suppose you have no dice, then where are you going?"
That'll fix him.'
The children met again the next morning. `Where are you going?' asked the first child.
'I'm going wherever the wind blows,' answered the other.
This reply also stopped the youngster, who hurried back to his Dicemaster.
`Ask him tomorrow where he's going if there's no wind. That'll fix him.'
The next day the children met a third time.
`Where are you going?' asked the first child.
`I'm going to the store to buy bubblegum,' the other replied.
from The Book of the Die
Chapter Eighty-three
`Daddy? Why do I have to brush my teeth every day?'
the little girl asked.
`Try this new tube I've got for you, Suzie, and you'll never ask that question again.'
[Close-up of a big long tube of Glare Toothpaste]
But I had to look away because Gina was kneeling on the floor, her hands tied behind her back with her bra, and Osterflood, with his pants and undershorts bunched at his feet but still dressed in white shirt, tie and suit jacket, was thrusting with hi
s erect, pink weapon at her mouth, cursing her at every poke. I felt I was watching a slow-motion movie showing some huge piston at work, but some flaw in the machinery resulted in the rod's seeming frequently to miss the wide-open mouth which Gina, large-eyed and expressionless, was presenting. Osterflood's sword of vengeance against the female race kept sliding past her cheek or her neck or poking her in the eye. Whenever she would seem to have a good mouthful (she would close her eyes then), Osterflood would withdraw, raging, and thrust away sporadically, redoubling his curses. It wasn't clear whether he hated her more when she sucked him in or when he missed contact and bounced painfully off her forehead. In both cases he seemed like a movie director enraged because she, the actress, didn't mouth her lines correctly.
`Ahhggg! How I hate you,' he yelled and lurched forward and collapsed onto the couch beside me. I smiled over at him.
He struggled sideways into a sitting position.
`Undress me, you disgusting, filthy hole,' he said loudly.
A cute, frightened peasant girl had joined the number-one earnest American and was pleading with him passionately about her corn crop. Without any apparent effort, Gina freed her hands and dropped the bra back onto the rug next to her skirt and sweater and the buttons and the pipe and came to the couch to undress him.
`Get me a drink,' he shouted to no one in particular as Gina tried to slide his pants over his shoes and off. She stood and said `Sure, honey. You want some acid?'
`I just want your ass, you sink!' he shouted after her.
`It's for the good of your country,' the firm TV voice said. Osterflood's sword was melting into an arch at the moment but mine wasn't. My body was tingling all over pleasantly and I had to adjust my .38 and my other rod (semi-automatic), to make all continue tingling pleasantly. I wondered how Osterflood could keep his hands off those breasts and buttocks and I deeply resented all his talking and his abominable aim.
He gulped down the drink she brought him while she slowly untied and removed each of his shoes and the CIA man drove a tractor and then on her knees in front of him she removed his necktie, unbuttoned one by one the buttons of his shirt and - all in a slow-motion movie which I watched as if it were a faithful newsreel of the Second Coming she had just managed to slide the second sleeve of his shirt down off his left arm (the peasants I could hear were cheering now and I glanced briefly to catch a glimpse of a forest of white, toothy grins), when Osterflood's huge, muscular arms loomed out, closed around her, his face plowed into her face and his mouth sunk into her mouth.
The Dice Man Page 39